


I'd Rather Pretend

by r3dheaven



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Psychotropic Drugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2019-12-07
Packaged: 2021-04-17 09:28:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21709663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/r3dheaven/pseuds/r3dheaven
Summary: Eliot Waugh was like Tinkerbell; couldn’t live without attention. Maybe that was the reason Penny pretended to never give it to him.
Relationships: William "Penny" Adiyodi/Eliot Waugh
Kudos: 12





	I'd Rather Pretend

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this in the summer, but eventually got distracted with other things. It's not complete by the means of what I intended, but I still think it's pretty solid standing on it's own which is why I decided to post it.

It was hard, sometimes, to watch people like Eliot. Because they could just  _ be  _ and be happy with it. He could do what he wanted and no one batted an eye. Everyone was always looking at him and he didn’t care. He encouraged it, even. 

Eliot Waugh was like Tinkerbell; couldn’t live without attention. Maybe that was the reason Penny pretended to never give it to him.

It was a party, one of many that would end up irrelevant and forgotten, very much lost in a drunken magical haze like many nights before. Penny was only at the cottage waiting around for Alice and Quentin to get their shit together for their study group from hell. They never showed, never came downstairs, if they were even there. Maybe they’d left to do what lovers did when they wanted to escape the intoxicated masses.

There was a shot sitting on the coffee table. No one was touching it. The glass sat there, swirling purple and green all by itself. It  _ looked _ like a Jell-O shot, but Penny knew better. Margo would never allow it, unless she was in some tropical country surrounded by only the hunkiest of men to have consume them off of her. They were too pedestrian otherwise, probably. That’s what she would think. What  _ they _ would think, both of them- Margo and Eliot.

He had nowhere better to be. Kady had fucked off after he’d proffessed his love to her. Now he was here, alone and looking for something to do so he didn’t end up poring over a basic Popper textbook in his dorm room like a loser. The shot continued to swirl temptingly. Penny leaned over, reaching for it. He held the shot glass in his fingers, looking at it. Without thinking, he brought it to his lips and swallowed.

It tasted fine enough. Normal enough. But this was no normal Jell-O shot, hence the purple-green light show it emanated. Eliot was trying out some new recipes: vodka, orange juice, vanilla ice cream and an emotion bottle spell, for one. He’d found it in a book in the cottage’s library and decided to reverse engineer it, using it to  _ amplify  _ emotions of those who drank his orange Creamsicle shots.

He sat back on the couch, arms out. A blonde woman in a violet tube top sat next to him. She traced his fingers with her own, making her way up his arm. Then she pecked Penny on the cheek. He turned to look at her, reaching for her face and gently pulling it towards his own. Their lips connected; it felt like Penny was kissing an electric generator.

She swung one of her denim clad legs over his lap, straddling him. The blonde attatched her lips to Penny’s neck, kissing up and down his skin. Something else caught his attention. Eliot strolled by with a shirtless man on each arm, face half covered in glitter. He didn’t notice Penny, disappearing back into the crowd like a ghost. There was something lingering where he’d walked past, though.

It was Eliot, sort of. It looked as though someone had made neon sign out of his form, getting the lips exactly thin and his hair tousled just so. This Eliot noticed Penny, noticed the woman in his lap. He winked, then laughed, approaching them. 

He held a glowing yellow hand out to him. Penny quickly moved, the woman slipping off of him as he stood. He didn’t look back to apologise, following Eliot through the mass of sweaty bodies. Penny took his glowing hand and followed him upstairs. There was a room door already open ajar. Eliot pushed the door open further, Penny following. 

A Cher poster hung framed above the wooden headboard, a steel grey duvet on the bed. Eliot pushed Penny further into the room from behind him. He stumbled forward, turning and looking at the bright figure. Eliot never spoke, standing there, glowing in the silence. Perhaps it was for dramatic effect. Eventually Penny sat on the edge of the bed, and a smile graced Eliot’s lips. For a second Penny even convinced himself that he was real. That this was real.

As Eliot approached, the lights that made up his body started to flicker. He was standing right over Penny when he disappeared altogether.

There was a still moment, where the world froze and his mind went blank. His back fell against the bed, the mattress making him bounce a little bit. He felt tired, very tired. Like everything in the entire universe was crawling on his skin like a billion little parasites, weighing his skin down to the point where it sloshed off his bones like melting ice cream.

He thought he was dying, and he was fine with it. Penny layed back and let the skin slip off his eyelids as he closed them.

What was he doing here? Study group, right. But what was he really doing here? Here, in the cottage. Brakebills. He could go anywhere. Space even, if he wanted for some astronaut to watch his body shatter into a million meaty pieces.

Something stirred in Penny’s stomach. Standing, he tripped over his own foot. He pictured the cottage’s front lawn, the sharp blades of grass that always nipped at his ankles. It felt like there were buzzards under his fingertips for a moment, the feeling he got before he traveled.

The air felt cool on his skin. He was outside the cottage's front door. Penny braced himself next to a wooden pillar, leaning over the grass. The vomit came slowly. He watched as the first dregs of his stomach contents poured out of his mouth. It was glowing yellow. He ignored it, closing his eyes and digging his nails into the pillar.

There was a nudge. A shift. A hand was on his thigh for a moment, then it disappeared. It felt like someone had pried him from a moist tomb, his back exposed to the air so he could now feel how wet it was. Something had soaked through the back of his shirt, into his hair, on his neck.

“He weighs a bag of shit bricks,” a voice grunted. Someone had him by the shoulders. Penny’s legs lifted, his left shoe almost slipping off. He opened his eyes to look down. Margo in a silk button down pajama shirt and matching pants. She was struggling as she held him up, ankles on her shoulders. “Do you think he’ll be okay?” she asked.

“Not too sure what he took, but I’m sure he’ll be fine.” Eliot. He sounded close; must’ve been the person carrying his shoulders.

They both carried him into the cottage, leaving him on the couch. Penny laid there, eyes opening and closing every once in a while. He fell asleep again for what felt like a minute, but when he opened his eyes again the sun was in a different position.

“Good, you’re awake,” Eliot’s voice came from the ottoman to the left of him. Penny moved just his eyeballs to look at him. He wore a khaki vest and dark purple tie, blue floral dress shirt. There were no bags under his eyes, his hair was gelled, legs crossed as he waited for Penny to get up and out of his home.

He groaned in repsonse, trying to move. His back ached, but it was dry now.

“You passed out in the grass last night. It rained, no one knew you were out there. I’m fairly certain your shirt’s grass stained. Who knows, you might go to shower and find that your-” Penny was still awake enough to glare at Eliot before he finished his sentence. “Right,” he said, changing the subject. There was a thermos beside him on the floor, two mugs on the cushion. Eliot reached for the thermos, unscrewing the metal lid. Red liquid flowed out of it into one of the mugs. “Bloody Mary?”

Penny felt like he could at least sit up now. He did, resting his back against the couch. He saw the slight twitch in Eliot’s right eye. “No fucking way. I don’t know what you put in your drinks, man, but it- it was fucking weird.”

“Suit yourself,” Eliot said. He took a long sip. Then he said, “So how was it? I was trying a new recipe; Jell-O shots and a severe emotions spell. Heightens  _ everything.” _

“It was fucking horrible,” Penny said, laughing. His laugh sounded like something, maybe an old book being dragged off an old shelf covered in dust and cobwebs. He eyed Eliot for a moment, smile going along with the laugh.

Silence. Eliot sipped his mug of Bloody Mary. The switch was flicked, changing the atmosphere from peaceful to awkward. Penny stood, swaying just a little. “I should get out of here,” he said.

Eliot stood with him, mug handle looped around his middle, ring and pinky fingers. “You’re sure you’re alright?” he asked.

Penny felt the reigns slipping. No, they’d already slipped. They had been lying next to him in the grass out there. “Tell Quentin and Alice they’re doing our Popper assignement,” he said, ignoring Eliot. He made for the door. As he grabbed onto the doorknob, the world seemed to freeze again. Something soured in Penny’s chest. Then it dropped, and time resumed. He turned the knob, opening the door. The sun was bright, beating down from the magically inclined blue sky. Penny let the heavy wooden door fall shut behind him, not looking back at Eliot watching him over the brim of his mug.

The showers in the Brakebills dorms were always cold. Penny stood in the bathroom, turning the handle the farthest it would go in the icy direction. He tested the water with his hand; the spray was so cold it burned. He pulled back the curtain, stepping under. First he started with his head, feeling the burning cold water flow down to his neck and back. It fell down his legs and wrapped around his calves, brushing his ankles and soaking his toes.

He stood there, soaking in the pain. When the tears broke and mixed with the water streaming down his face, he felt like a stupid teenager. He bared his teeth, the back two teeth grinding

Penny turned the handle, shutting off the water. His skin was covered in goosebumps. He couldn’t tell if it was tears or water on his face. He didn’t want to know. Stepping out, he grabbed the towel off of the back of the door and dried himself.

Sometimes he forgot that Quentin didn’t live with him anymore. The man - if you could even call him that- was the subject of Penny’s watchings until he’d moved out and Penny met Eliot, and his focus shifted.

He noticed, though, that Quentin paid the same attention to Eliot that he did. It was different, of course, because he was fairly sure that Quentin was  _ into  _ Eliot, and Penny just wasn’t that. Eliot was simply an interesting spectacle. It was the only time Penny ever wanted to know what someone was thinking, watching him. He preferred to compare it to watching an accident on the highway. You know you should keep driving but you can’t help but look.

The mirror showed Penny his face. There was a bruise on his left cheek- probably where his face made impact with the cottage lawn. There were several smaller bruises along his neck, too. His mind gave him a brief flash of the blonde that had been necking him for a few minutes. A smile spread across his face, macho mentality conquering for a moment. As he stared at the hickeys longer, though, the pride dissipated and his smile fell.

The thought that Penny was gay had occured to him before, of course. Or, well, maybe not gay- bisexual, if the internet had informed him correctly and someone absolutely needed to put a label on it.

This thought also terrified him. He had nothing against gay people; never had, never would. It just felt wrong for  _ him  _ specifically to be gay, or bi or sexually fluid. Attracted to men. There. Like it was something within his DNA, that if William Adiyodi was into men it was wrong, that this was a rule decreed many years before he had been born and that’s the way it was.

It’s the reason why he only  _ looked.  _ Even then he still thought looking was dangerous. Think of it as a PSA, and the tag line would be, “Looking is a gateway drug.” A gateway drug to what, you ask? Penny didn’t know. He didn’t want to know what was on the other side of the gate, and at the same time was desperate to.

He had dreams, sometimes, about other guys. Usually it’d be an everyday scenario, he’s sitting through another boring lesson on wintertime Cirumstances and a cute guy across the room would catch his eye and smile, or wink. Penny would nod back in a bit of a frat bro way, or ignore him or roll his eyes. It used to have been random faces he’d seen around campus, but more and more now the faces would morph into Eliot’s.

Like a movie, it would cut to him backing the guy into a campus bathroom, hoisting him up onto the marble sink countertop and making out with him, Eliot-looking or otherwise. Sometimes his brain, in some weirdly interrupting and sidebar-ish way, would logic in that he had no idea whether this was realistic at all; it probably wasn’t.

Penny always woke up from those dreams sweating, which he blamed on the broken air conditioner in his dorm room, which was in fact not broken at all. The student housing super intendant got used to his bi-weekly calls, rolling her eyes as she walked through his door once a month to check out the air conditioning unit and find that, ah! There’s nothing wrong with it at all. Just like the last time. And the time before.

He didn’t like sleeping anymore, anyway. It made him too vulnerable, to that and to the Voice.

Eliot watched him leave over the brim of his mug, waiting until the door closed to turn away.

“He’s cute,” Eliot said aloud.

“He’s not your friend,” Margo countered. She rounded a bookshelf, seemingly appearing from thin air.

“And who here exactly is truly our friend?” he asked.

Margo pursed her lips; to a certain degree, he had a point. “Well he’s not. And he’s not going to be one of your boy toys either,” she said instead. She took a seat on the ottoman, looking up at Eliot.

He sat down next to her, mug still in his hand. “What makes you think that?”

“Penny’s not the type, trust me. He’s got this whole… macho thing, going on. No way he’s into dudes.” Eliot raised an eyebrow, making her go over that sentence. “Okay. No way he’s into  _ you.” _

“I don’t know whether I should be complimented or highly offended,” Eliot said, taking a sip of his morning Bloody Mary, tasting the vodka and tabasco.

He only noticed Penny because he was so  _ angry.  _ Sometimes it seemed to come off of him in waves. He had an appreciation for the sardonic, though, and not buttoning up his shirts which made him more appealing. And then there was that emotional underbelly that he almost never let show.

Eliot could see a small piece of himself reflecting back at him whenever he looked at Penny; the anger, mostly. There had been a time when Eliot was very angry. At his parents. The world.

Whenever he looked Penny in the eye, he could see the bursting flame of that bundle of hay out back in his father’s field. This was after the accident he’d caused, a few years before Brakebills. He’d just gotten into college. A great university, nowhere near home. Eliot knew what he could do, knew what he was- to a certain degree. But he was just so. So angry.

It was a beaten down bundle of hay, truly multiple that had unraveled and fallen to the dirt over time; he had to keep dragging a new one over the old one once he’d kicked and punched it enough that the rough twine holding the straws together couldn’t hold them any longer.

He’d gotten the acceptance letter in the mail that evening. It felt like a wave had washed over him, though he had never seen the ocean: relief, fear, sadness, joy, pride and then- he was so  _ mad _ . Eliot was just so upset and he didn’t know  _ why.  _ There was no reason to be, his dreams were coming true. So he went out back to that pile of hay, some of it bundled, some of it loose. Eliot couldn’t hit it. There wasn’t any adrenaline coursing through his body to get him motivated enough to do anything physical.

He stared at it. Long and hard, thoughts of gibberish from fights long passed and resentments forgotten swirling in his mind. It felt like his brain was burning. And then, all of a sudden the hay was burning, and there was a single tear traveling down his cheek. His mind was clear now.

Eliot stayed completely still as he watched it burn, ash and smoke rising. It went out by itself eventually; he was still standing there when it did. His thumb had twitched, and then his whole body moved and turned him around to face his house- soon to be home no longer.

A small, echoey thin part of him still thought about that, was dedicated to that one memory. It was far back in his mind, but always there. That part sometimes ponders if he would have burned the house down, too. Well, of course not, it thinks. Not unless everyone was outside, safe and away. 

And an even smaller part replies, I think I would have. I don’t think I would have cared.

It was morning. Penny  _ wasn’t _ waking up on someone’s lawn, so that had already blown the last night out of the water in terms of good circumstances. The first thing he saw was the drab ceiling of his room. Then he sat up, slowly so he wouldn’t mess up his neck. It was already hurting from previous escapades in getting up too quickly and sleeping on uneven surfaces.

The analog clock on his nighstand was unplugged. His phone was under his pillow with low battery. It was noon, Monday. Saturday night party, Sunday night sleeping, Monday classes. He’d already missed one, though surely Alice would give him the cliff notes- if she showed up tomorrow. Every Tuesday and Saturday at eight, the merry band of magical losers met up to study. Considering it wasn’t his most coveted time slot of the week, Penny could bear it. Quentin obviously didn’t know too much of shit, though, so he mostly listened to Alice.

Alice was nice. She was smart, and hot, and Penny was pretty sure they had a friendship thing going on. She was with Quentin, though, which made both his observations about her attractiveness and his observations about Quentin’s observations of Eliot awkward. God, there was so much useless shit floating around in his mind at any given moment.

Penny bent his fingers, knuckles cracking. He pushed the covers off of his legs, swinging them over the bed and onto the floor. His toes were cold against the hardwood. Flexing his back, he stood and walked to the bathroom. There were still two classes to attend, and a meeting with Sunderland. She hadn’t told him what it was about, but Penny wasn’t too worried.

There was no bathroom melodrama this afternoon, thank god. He brushed his teeth, changed, ran his hands through his hair to do  _ something  _ with it. When he was ready, he moved on and out towards the main campus building.

Sunderland was happy to see him. They talked more about his psychic abilities, about Traveling. She said he’d have to get a tattoo.

“It’s to keep you grounded. Assure that when you travel, you don’t end up in any… peculiar situations,” she said cryptically.

“Like…?”  
“Oh, I don’t know: strung out in space, the oxgyen-bare top of Mount Everest. Since there is no emergency button to hit when it comes to Traveling magic, this is that pre-emptive button. It’ll only hurt a bit.”

Penny was skeptical. He liked Brakebills enough, but it’s still a stuffy and age old institution. Stuffy and age old institutions had a frequent history of fucking up people like him’s lives. They had a history of fucking up lives in general.

“Sure,” he said anyway.

Eliot laid on the couch, long body taking up all of the space on the piece of furniture. He’d taken off his two-tone khaki vest and left it on the floor; the fabric was restrictive to his lounging pose.

He hears Margo before he sees her. She was wearing heels, hadn’t taken them off all day. They had gotten back from Woof at least an hour ago and she was still fuming about what had happened with Penny.

“I should have just dunked him in the fountain after all,” she had grumbled, along with many other things on the walk back. She entered the living room now, almost tripping over the vest on the floor. Margo bent down, grabbing it and throwing it at Eliot’s belly.

“Get your shit together!” she said harshly.

Eliot glanced between her and the shot that he’d forgotten was on the coffee table next to him. He sat up, raising a finger matter-of-factly. “I believe you’re taking your angers out on me for something that isn’t my fault.” Then he reached for the shot, brought the glass to his lips and downed it, no chaser.

Margo sat across from him on the ottoman. “Oh really? It’s not  _ your  _ crush who just threatened me?” she asked, tone laced with angry sarcasm. “I don’t even understand the appeal. I mean, I do but-”

“There  _ is  _ no appeal Margo. I don’t have a crush on one Penny Adiyodi,” Eliot said, also matter-of-factly. “You can… relax now,” he waived at her with a limp hand vaguely.

“Whatever. I’m bored, we should have thrown a party,” Margo huffed.

Eliot laid back down. “When was the last time either one of us went to a class?” he asked. It wasn’t judgemental, purely speculative. He couldn’t exactly remember.

Margo let out a light laugh. “At this point? Late 2014, maybe early 2015. Why?”

Eliot rolled over slightly so he was on his side now, making eye contact with her over the short table between them. “I was thinking of going. Maybe Lipson’s class. She’s always entertaining.”

Margo crossed her arms, waiting for the punchline. It didn’t come. She laughed again, through her nose so that her chest punched up with the air. “You may not like the resident brooding man-boy, but  _ something  _ certainly has changed in you, Eliot.” She still didn’t look too convinced.

He didn’t feel any different, hadn’t noticed anything. He  _ had  _ lied to Margo about not having an interest in Penny; he kept searching for the man’s eyes at parties, hoping he’d have wondered over for his, Quentin and Alice’s little study group and gotten carried away with something. So far it had only happened once, and Eliot had already been… occupied. Guessing by how the night had ended, and where they’d picked him up from outside on the lawn, it probably hadn’t gone too well. Which meant it probably wouldn’t happen again.

Eliot sighed, shutting off his brain. He let his head fall onto the patterned throw pillow behind him.


End file.
